Michael Moore

Michael Francis Moore, born on April 23, 1954, in Flint, Michigan, is an American film director, producer, screenwriter, author, and Broadway performer. He grew up in the nearby suburb of Davison, where his father, Francis Richard Moore, worked on an automotive assembly line, and his grandfather also worked in the General Motors factories that dominated Flint at the time. His uncle LaVerne was among the founders of the United Automobile Workers labor union and took part in the Flint sit-down strike. Moore was raised in a traditional Catholic household and has Irish, Scottish, and English ancestry, with some Quaker forebears. He attended St. John's Elementary School and later spent a year at St. Paul's Seminary in Saginaw, Michigan, before enrolling at Davison High School, where he participated in drama and debate. At eighteen, he was elected to the Davison school board, becoming at that time the youngest person elected to public office in the United States following the lowering of the minimum age requirement. He subsequently attended the University of Michigan–Flint but left during his second year.

At twenty-two, Moore founded an alternative newspaper in Burton, Michigan, initially called Free to Be, which was later renamed The Flint Voice and eventually The Michigan Voice as its coverage expanded statewide. Singer-songwriter Harry Chapin served as the publication's primary financial backer, performing benefit concerts and donating the proceeds after Moore persuaded him backstage following a concert. The Michigan Voice published its final issue in April 1986. Moore then briefly served as an editor at Mother Jones magazine in San Francisco before being dismissed in early September of that year. He subsequently settled a wrongful dismissal lawsuit for $58,000, money he used in part to fund his first film. He also worked for Ralph Nader as the editor of a newsletter during this period, which provided additional financial support.

Moore's debut documentary, Roger & Me, released in 1989, examined the economic collapse of Flint following General Motors' decision to close its local factories and relocate production to Mexico. The film brought him widespread public recognition. He followed it with a 23-minute PBS documentary in 1992, Pets or Meat: The Return to Flint, which revisited subjects from the original film. His 1995 satirical feature Canadian Bacon starred Alan Alda as a fictional U.S. president who engineers a fake conflict with Canada and was also among the final films featuring Canadian actor John Candy. Moore's 1997 film The Big One documented the promotional tour for his book Downsize This! Random Threats from an Unarmed American, during which he criticized corporations including Nike for outsourcing labor while reporting record profits.

His 2002 documentary Bowling for Columbine investigated gun culture and violence in the United States, using the 1999 Columbine High School massacre as its central reference point. The film won the Anniversary Prize at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival, France's César Award for Best Foreign Film, and the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Moore then directed and produced Fahrenheit 9/11, a critical examination of the early presidency of George W. Bush and the war on terror. The film won the Palme d'Or at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival and earned $119,194,771 at the American box office, making it the highest-grossing documentary in American box office history at that time. His subsequent documentary Sicko examined the American health care system and ranked among the ten highest-grossing documentaries as of 2020. In September 2008, Moore released Slacker Uprising, a documentary about his efforts to encourage voter participation in presidential elections, distributed freely on the internet. He also wrote and appeared in two satirical television series, TV Nation and The Awful Truth. In 2018, he released Fahrenheit 11/9, a documentary focused on the 2016 United States presidential election and the early presidency of Donald Trump, and he served as executive producer on Planet of the Humans, a 2019 documentary about the environmental movement. In 2005, Time magazine named Moore one of the world's 100 most influential people.

Moore brought his work to Broadway in 2017, appearing in and writing the book for The Terms of My Surrender, a stage production that extended his career as a performer and writer beyond film and television.